The following changes are the most important ones from our point of view:

The tools FOLKER and OrthoNormal which were developed on the basis of EXMARaLDA for the FOLK project at IDS Mannheim are now also part of the EXMARaLDA distributions. FOLKER can be used as an alternative transcription tool in lieu of the Partitur-Editor, OrthoNormal supports token annotation (orthographic normalisation, lemmatisation and POS tagging) of transcriptions. Both tools are interoperable on many levels with the “classic” EXMARaLDA tools.

Support for audio and video playback (in the Partitur-Editor, in EXAKT, in FOLKER) has been largely re-implemented. For audio playback, the BAS audio player is now available on all systems. For video playback, we have integrated ELAN’s JDS player on Windows and ELAN’s CocoaQT-Player on the Macintosh. Cross-platform video support continues to be a challenge for EXMARaLDA. Please make sure to consult our recommendations concerning “Audio and video support in EXMARaLDA”.

The Partitur-Editor has a new menu CLARIN, for calling web services from the CLARIN infrastructure: with WebMAUS from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals, transcriptions can be automatically aligned with the audio on word or phoneme level. The WebLicht service from the University of Tübingen allows different automatic annotation tools to be applied to a transcription. More documentation is available in a (German) tutorial video and in the respective sections of the manual.

In August 2016, the ISO-Standard “24624:2016 Language resource management – Transcription of spoken language” was published. The EXMARaLDA Partitur-Editor, as well as FOLKER and OrthoNormal are able to export transcriptions into this format. The TEIDrop utility was adapted to the specifications of this standard.

As can be gathered from the long interval lying between the last two releases, we still have difficulties to find, in-between our main professional work and the user support, the time for the necessary maintenance work on EXMARaLDA. We continue to work on a solution that will allow us to put the work on EXMARaLDA on a more solid basis again and to publish updates in more regular intervals in the future. We would like to thank, on this occasion, several projects that have supported our project not only with interesting ideas but also with financial means for realising them.